The first draft of anything is shit. — Ernest Hemingway

The first draft of anything is shit.

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Insight: There's something oddly liberating about permission to be bad at first. Most of us never start things because we're already imagining the final version—the polished version, the one people will actually see. We compare our blank page to someone else's finished work and feel the gap immediately. But Hemingway's bluntness cuts through that paralysis. He's not saying your first attempt will have rough edges. He's saying it will be genuinely rough, possibly embarrassing, definitely unfinished. And that's completely fine. The real insight here is that creation and criticism have to happen in separate phases. The part of your brain that generates ideas is different from the part that judges them, and if you let the critic in too early, the creator goes silent. Whether you're writing an email, designing something for work, or learning a skill, that first version isn't the product—it's raw material. It needs to exist before it can be shaped into something worthwhile. This matters because perfectionism often masquerades as high standards when it's really just fear wearing a nice outfit. If you can genuinely accept that starting messy is part of the process, not a sign of failure, you remove one of the biggest obstacles to actually finishing anything. The blank page becomes less intimidating when you know the first draft gets to be terrible.

Source: Letter to Bernard Berenson, 1951

/Quotes

Separate Creating from Judging

The first draft of anything is shit.

Ernest HemingwayLetter to Bernard Berenson, 1951

There's something oddly liberating about permission to be bad at first. Most of us never start things because we're already imagining the final version—the polished version, the one people will actually see. We compare our blank page to someone else's finished work and feel the gap immediately. But Hemingway's bluntness cuts through that paralysis. He's not saying your first attempt will have rough edges. He's saying it will be genuinely rough, possibly embarrassing, definitely unfinished. And that's completely fine.

The real insight here is that creation and criticism have to happen in separate phases. The part of your brain that generates ideas is different from the part that judges them, and if you let the critic in too early, the creator goes silent. Whether you're writing an email, designing something for work, or learning a skill, that first version isn't the product—it's raw material. It needs to exist before it can be shaped into something worthwhile.

This matters because perfectionism often masquerades as high standards when it's really just fear wearing a nice outfit. If you can genuinely accept that starting messy is part of the process, not a sign of failure, you remove one of the biggest obstacles to actually finishing anything. The blank page becomes less intimidating when you know the first draft gets to be terrible.

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Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was an influential American novelist and short-story writer known for his concise and impactful writing style. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for his mastery of the art of modern storytelling, particularly noted for works such as "The Old Man and the Sea," "A Farewell to Arms," and "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

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